In Korean, non-final conjuncts in coordinate constructions may appear without the tensed verb - as in Right Peripheral Ellipsis - or without the tense morpheme alone - as in bare ko-coordination. This paper presents a formal acceptability judgment study that explored whether and to what extent Korean speakers accept mismatches of temporal information between the conjuncts in these constructions. The study examined the factors whose effects have been controversial in previous theoretical studies: temporal reference (i.e., whether the conjuncts match in tense) and temporal organization (i.e., whether the conjuncts are ordered sequentially or reversed) across three coordinate structures (i.e., Right Peripheral Ellipsis, bare ko-coordination, and full coordination). The results show evidence of the effects of these factors on bare ko-coordination and evidence of the effect of temporal reference on Right Peripheral Ellipsis. They also reveal that Korean speakers exhibit a great deal of inter-speaker variation in their assessment of temporal mismatches in these constructions. We discuss the implications of the results for both theoretical. and psycholinguistic research.
1. Introduction
2. Asymmetry of temporal reference and variation in the organization of time
3. Experiment
4. General discussion
5. Conclusion
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